Now it’s possible to upgrade your current used Ubuntu release to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail, and this tutorial will teach you how to do it in Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal in detail.

At the moment 13.04 is still in beta or alpha phase which means it’s not fully stable and may contain bugs and issues. You can try the upgrade on a test machine instead of a production system, or wait until 13.04 final to be released on April 25th and then continue reading this tutorial.

Before get started, do backup your important files, documents and also web browser bookmarks; If you have downloaded and installed proprietary drivers manually directly from the manufacturers website then the recommendation is to remove these drivers first and revert to the open-source drivers before upgrading.

There are a couple of specific PPA repositories that could cause issues. So it’s recommended to disable all third party repositories before starting any upgrade process. You can do it at System Settings -> Software Sources… -> Other Software.

When everything is ready, get started with following steps:

First, hit Ctrl+Alt+T to open terminal and run command to update your system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Then hit Alt+F2 to bring up run command box and type in:

update-manager -d

It brings up the Software Updater window. After checking for updates, you’ll see the prompt “Ubuntu 13.04 is now available”. Click on Upgrade and then start the process.